Ageas, an international insurance group headquartered in Brussels, is making history in its industry. Last week SAP issued a press release and I wanted to highlight the great news.
The company recently teamed up with SAP to adopt the industry’s first end-to-end insurance software in the cloud deployed by a single software vendor. This comprehensive insurance-in-a-box offering will allow Ageas to streamline its insurance processes from sales and operations to finance.
“The difficulty in building IT for an insurance company is that you need many components,” says Hans Van Wuijckhuijse, regional director, Business Development Asia, Ageas. “How nice would it be to say ‘here is a box and this is the box that contains everything you will need from day one as an insurance company? Plug it into the power outlet and it starts working for you.’” The ability to achieve this is the main reason that Van Wuijckhuijse turned to SAP, as this offering supports the full insurance lifecycle. It includes back- and front-end processes, with an all-inclusive set of integrated SAP solutions that help insurance companies operate their business in the cloud.
The global insurance group specializes in building insurance partnerships with banks and retailers, and its next target is Southeast Asia. “Ageas will launch the suite at its new joint venture in the Philippines and potentially use the new solution portfolio for other green-field operations. With this comprehensive set of next-generation enterprise software from SAP, Ageas gets to focus on its customers and the core of its business, instead of being in the business of also running a midscale technology services firm internally,” says Van Wuijckhuijse.
The hosted, end-to-end enterprise insurance software is built on SAP S/4HANA, which delivers simplified customer engagement tools through the SAP HANA platform. It includes over 30 SAP solutions and omnichannel functionality powered by software from hybris, an SAP company. Core insurance solutions support policy administration, quotation, underwriting, claims, commissions, collections and disbursements, as well as finance, procurement, HR and enterprise analytics. These are all deployed on SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, a fully managed and secure cloud that offers flexibility and quick time to market.
“It’s the regular, complete suite that you would need to build a company,” say says Van Wuijckhuijse. “The big difference is that it’s all SAP.” The software will enable the company to have the full functionality it needs on day one for its new markets. “Normally we are looking at a nine-month period to set up a company from scratch to sell the first policy. Now we expect to reduce that time to 6 months and to have a far more complete IT environment.” And the cost savings? Van Wuijckhuijse expects it to be between 20-40% within the first five years.
Beyond the robust platform functionality, SAP will be providing a simplified end-to-end engagement model, from subscription to services and from enablement to support. It will enable Ageas to streamline further its IT management and support, reduce total cost of ownership, accelerate its time to market, strengthen operational agility across lines of business and achieve transparency and compliance.
To learn more about this end-to-end solution, please read the announcement. Or watch an interview with Van Wuijckhuijse here. For more information on about SAP technology and insurance offerings, please visit sap.com/insurance.
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